Lawyers and other professionals within the legal profession often need to work long hours under tight deadlines in order to complete tasks. As a result, some lawyers and judges might make attorneys and other professionals work through lunch in order to complete projects with the least amount of wasted time. Sometimes, a genuine emergency requires people to work through lunch in order to complete projects on exigent schedules. However, most of the time, lawyers and other professionals should be given a lunch break, since it is the humane thing to do, and tasks are not important enough to warrant working through lunch.
Earlier this year, I was in court, and had to stay in the courthouse because a judge wanted to speak with the lawyers involved with a few dozen cases. I did not expect this to take too long since all the judge needed to do was ascertain the status of the matter and assign a trial date. However, I ended up waiting in court for six hours to speak with the judge for perhaps three minutes.
Around noon, I started to get hungry, and I asked the court officers if I could leave the courthouse in in order to grab a bite to eat. The court officers told me that I needed to stay put since the judge could call my case at anytime and would not wait for me to return after eating lunch. I ended up needing to procure lunch from a vending machine in the courthouse, which was not an ideal situation. This is a real shame since one of my favorite fast-food chains was located a few hundred feet from the courthouse. I used to be a competitive eater (yes, it’s true!), so I probably could have made it to the restaurant, ate my lunch, and returned to the courthouse in about 15 minutes. The court should have given me the courtesy of allowing me to grab a bite to eat since people operate better when they are not hungry.
Many times in my careers, lawyers suggest working through lunch to compete depositions. In some circumstances, this makes sense. If lawyers are in a remote location, and the lawyers can either work through lunch or return for another day of testimony, it is usually advisable to work through lunch. However, when lawyers are involved in a routine deposition in the area around their offices, it is usually discourteous to pressure attorneys to work through lunch unless they are absolutely fine doing so.
There are many reasons why lunch breaks make sense in the legal profession. Perhaps most importantly, people need to eat food to stay concentrated, and sometimes, even for health reasons. When people do not eat for a long time, they can become grumpy, and most practitioners know that lawyers are not always the best people to be around in stressful situations. Moreover, a lunch break is often necessary for lawyers to attend to other matters. When someone is taking or defending a deposition all day, it is often impossible for them to respond to emails, take phone calls, or work on any of the other matters to which that lawyer is assigned. In addition, it is usually best to take a mental break from a matter so that the lawyer can approach a task with fresh eyes after a lunch break is completed.
All told, courts and lawyers need to be aware that it is not easy for everyone to forgo a lunch break in order to focus the maximum amount of attention on a legal matter. Unless there is a real exigency, lawyers and other legal professionals like court reporters should be entitled to a lunch break.
Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.
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